The disused, dusty airstrip stretching for a kilometre in the Shurugwi communal lands was partly seized by angry peasant farmers annoyed by the Zimbabwean government’s failure to allocate them some of the more fertile farms confiscated from whites.
Apparently, the desperate villagers wanted to convert the airstrip, situated on state land in Midlands province, more than 300km south-west of Harare, into small plots for cropping after the government allegedly failed to provide them enough arable land under its controversial farm-redistribution programme.
Reports, including some by government-appointed commissions, say senior officials of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and government benefited the most from land taken from whites, with some said to have grabbed up to six farms each.
A stone’s throw from the airstrip, at Chachacha — a rural service centre — villagers from far afield spend the night sheltering from the driving rain under shop verandahs as they wait their turn to have maize milled into the staple maize-meal when the hammer-millers open for business the following morning.
However, an acute fuel crisis gripping Zimbabwe since 1999 means there is no guarantee the villagers will be able to have their maize milled before the diesel-powered hammer-mill runs out of fuel.
In Furusa, further inland, electricity poles erected by the government, as far back as 2001 under the national rural electrification programme, now scatter the barren landscape after the project was shelved because of spiralling costs.
Chachacha itself — a small but busy focal centre for the surrounding communities — boasted modest enterprise, by Zimbabwe’s rural standards, until recent years when it became another casualty of the economic crisis gripping the entire Southern African nation.
Without commodities to sell, shops started closing down one by one and public transport shunned the impassable roads.
Collapsing infrastructure
Across the country in Domboshawa rural area, about 80km north of Harare, the situation is not any better either, with the dangerously potholed roads and the dilapidated local government buildings examples of collapsing infrastructure across once-vibrant Zimbabwe.
Unlucky patients are turned away at the local rural hospital, which does not have the barest of basic medicines and food — perhaps so that they can go and die quietly at home.
The same story is replicated in Chiweshe communal lands, 100km from the capital in the north-central Mashonaland province, where villagers talk of general dejection and betrayal by Mugabe’s government.
The villagers of Chiweshe — one of the areas that witnessed the worst fighting during the brutal 1970s independence war led by Mugabe and the late Joshua Nkomo — accuse the administration in Harare of failing to implement sustainable policies and projects to alleviate poverty in rural areas over the years.
And they appear to have ready answers when asked what they think went wrong with what seemed to be noble state rural-development plans well on course just 10 years ago.
Pedzisai Mukucha, a retired schoolteacher turned public bus driver, says in Chiweshe: ”It is very easy to see that we have been used all these years to entrench Mugabe’s rule; now it’s hard to remove him from power. I have left the party [Zanu-PF] because it is not serving the interests of the ordinary man like me.”
Chenai Matauke from Domboshawa refuses to say where her political faith lies, but still revealingly declares: ”I have made up my mind. I want a different leadership that can make my life better, but my vote is secret.”
Loyalty test
Zimbabweans vote in Saturday’s combined presidential, parliamentary and local council elections that are increasingly looking to become the ultimate test of rural voters’ loyalty to Mugabe, whose guerrillas they staunchly backed during the armed struggle and whose government they have traditionally voted for in previous elections.
Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain, is seeking another five-year term in an election coming in the backdrop of an acute economic and food crisis — one that every analyst agrees a sitting government anywhere else in the world would lose.
The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which controls urban areas, has sought to make the economic crisis and deteriorating living standards central issues in its campaign to rob Mugabe’s government of its lifeblood rural vote.
”It is very clear that our [MDC] momentum in the rural areas is unstoppable now and shows that even more people are coming up to stand for political change as we approach election day,” says Nelson Chamisa, a spokesperson of the larger faction of the MDC led by Morgan Tsvangirai.
Former finance minister Simba Makoni, who has rebelled to stand as an independent against Mugabe in the presidential race, has also been telling rural voters that they should vote for change because they stand to benefit just as much as their cousins in cities and towns.
Zanu-PF spokesperson Nathan Shamuyarira was not immediately available for comment, but Mugabe has repeatedly vowed at his rural campaign rallies that neither the MDC nor Makoni would ever win the rural vote or let alone be ”allowed” to rule Zimbabwe.
Rallies
Mugabe, who remains a wily and cunning politician even at age 84, has been doling out food, computers for rural schools, buses, farm equipment and cows at his well-attended rallies in rural areas, in what analysts say is a clear attempt to keep rural voters indebted to him.
However, Chamisa is adamant that even rural voters are now used to Mugabe dishing out goodies in days before elections to gain their favour, only to abandon them after winning. He says: ”Yesterday rural people could be fooled with food handouts, but in this day and age you can’t hoodwink those rural voters who are all too familiar with Mugabe’s tricks.”
A recent survey by the respected Mass Public Opinion Institute also appears to back opposition claims that the March 29 polls will be the last Mugabe will run as incumbent president, with the veteran leader shown trailing Tsvangirai, whose support is surging as voting day draws nearer.
University of Zimbabwe mathematics lecturer and political commentator Heneri Dzinotyiwei says the huge turnouts seen at Mugabe’s rallies in rural areas are not necessarily a show of support, but villagers attend in the hope they will also be able to benefit from the many freebies distributed at these gatherings.
He says: ”The rural people realise that nothing short of change will be better for them. And so people have gathered enough courage to attend MDC rallies in big numbers as a show of support.”
However, with Saturday beckoning, the jury is still out on whether the ties Mugabe forged with the rural community during the bitter days of the liberation struggle and that have seemed unshakeable — at least not until after the present generation of voters is gone — have been finally severed. — ZimOnline